A Look Under Google’s Hood

Published by Ben | Filed under Search Engines

Excellent article I saw in the New York Times

Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine

Google’s top minds offer a peek inside the algorithm that provides search results for half a billion users.

This is the most open article I’ve seen on the inner workings of Google’s search engineering team - the ones that figure out how to rank Web sites. While you won’t get any top-secret tips about the algorithm, it’s a fascinating read about how they tackle problems and try to continuously improve search results. They even talk about specific problems / searches and how they improved results.

One particularly insightful & interesting piece that I liked, and something people still don’t seem to accept - PageRank is only ONE of the factors that determine your ranking (you can tell this to some people until you’re blue in the face and they still only look @ PageRank)